Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/253

XVIII ] the sense impressions from the organs and passed them on to the intellectual mind. This, also called the rational mind, had, it will be remembered, an upper and a lower division, and enough free will to choose whether life was to be lived on the terms of indulging the senses at the expense of the soul or of using the sense impressions in order to advance in goodness and wisdom.

In the latter case, communications were kept open with the spiritual mind, or with that in man which was capable of letting the Divine enter and rule all the rest of his natures.

Swedenborg kept changing the names of these natures, but generally speaking he called them external and internal. He insisted that even if the gross material body were sloughed off, a considerable part of the external man remained—his sensual psychic organism with its instinctive desires, and the lower half of the intellectual mind, the part which dealt with impressions from the outer world. This it usually had learned to do with such competence and gusto that it seemed to itself to be the better half or even the whole man. The inner self, capable of receiving divine wisdom in its understanding and divine love in its spiritual mind, could atrophy or be perverted because of the gross dominance of the outer.

This aged, and ageless, conception of the inner and outer natures of man has been put into modern psychological terms by Dr. Jung. He calls the "external man" the "Persona," or the mask, which he defines as "a compromise between the individual and society, based on that which one appears to be." 15

The destruction of that compromise Swedenborg "saw" as taking place in the other world, in the "world of spirits," as he called it. This was the limitless region, or rather state of mind, between the ultimate states of heaven and hell into which nearly all men come after death.

In this region, about which Swedenborg was much more articulate than about either of the others, "there are three states of life through which a man passes before he enters either heaven or hell." The first state is that of his outer mind.

"There is an inner region and an outer region of every man's spirit. In the outer region reside those powers by which in the world he adapts his body, especially his face, speech and demeanor to the society in which he moves, but the inner region of the spirit